Pain
by indigowaterbears
Summary: A brief journey through Amelia's life and her forever changing relationship with pain.


It wasn't news. Amelia had gone through this enough times to know the drill. Or so she liked to think. She'd started off pretty young and in one way or another she'd always found her way back there. What was different this time was how alone she was. She wasn't alone per se, she really wasn't, but she couldn't help the feeling. Pain was such a constant in her life it was hard to imagine to ever be entirely rid of it. When her father died, she had no idea what it meant, the only damage it did to her was in destroying the idea of the superhero daddy. Daddies don't die, they live forever because they have to chase away the monsters from underneath the bed and close closets' doors so that they can't come in. Amelia had to learn fast that monsters don't live only in closets and under beds, monsters live everywhere and monsters look like you or me or anyone, really. Derek took over the monster proofing duty, but Amelia knew she would never be truly safe again. Amelia was never able to trust someone again, not like she had before, not unless she was completely and utterly sure they weren't a monster. Amelia trusted her family, but no one else, really.

It was when she was older that she figured she was wrong. It was a stupid conviction only a child could come up with. She was on top of the world and she couldn't imagine her world to be populated by monsters at all. As a teenager her world mainly consisted of rebelling – at the time of course, she believed it was her due for all the suffering she'd endured, it was her way to get back at the universe. If only that were true. Pain left, suddenly one day, pain left without notice. It was replaced by what she thought was love and friendship and pure adrenaline. To think it only took a pill to make it go away, to think it had been within her reach all this time was ridiculous. Of course, Amelia changed her mind when pain came back, just as quick and silent as it had gone, pain came back with a vengeance burning through her entire body, spreading through like she'd never felt it and Amelia thought it was death, not pain. Now she knew it was Derek pressing on her chest, fighting so that she would live. Pain was different that day and it would be forever different, pain had come back with fear. Fear and anguish she would always feel deep in the darkest corners of her being. Pain was back, pain had never really left and this was a hard truth to accept.

What Amelia learned, though, as she matured was that pain and happiness weren't mutually exclusive. She knew pain was there, the mere mention of her name sent a jolt down her spine, a part of her father she'd always carry around with her – along with half his genes. As years passed, as she accomplished what anyone her age could only dream of, Amelia found happiness. It wasn't perhaps happiness in the common acceptation, but it was something that kept her going. The adrenaline rush, the superpower, the never ending high that came with opening someone up, from putting her hands in someone'd body and fix it. Her sisters insisted she'd gone into neuro because of Derek, because she copied everything he did and Amelia only wished that were true. Truth was, she wasn't sure herself why she did go into neurosurgery when she knew she'd have to live in her brother's shadow for the rest of her life. She was just good at it, gifted someone would say, she had the Shepherd neuro gene. It didn't matter, she didn't care, not about this. Cutting was her new thing and brains were complex and risky and high stakes enough to be her new drug. An addict's got to be addicted to something, right?

Pain was there, the cravings were there and, really, her life – when taken apart at its core – was not all that much different than that of the little girl who witnessed her father being shot or the teenager who almost died in the back of an ambulance. Amelia was smart, extremely and enviably smart, she could have almost everything she wanted professionally and she got it all, but personally she had the annoying tendency to screw it all up all the time. Luckily natural selection had made her likable and adorable and people genuinely liked her at first glance. As they got to know her the immature, annoying and slightly arrogant side came out and, if she was lucky enough, they cared too much to let those little things come in the way. Yet, the first people that actually got to know her well enough to want to keep her were in LA.

Addison loved Amelia. When Derek brought Addison home Amelia was in middle school and she was definitely over excited at the prospect of having a big sister that actually cared about her. It seemed Addison was equally content with her. They became sisters and no divorce would change that. Moving to California, working at the practice, building a family was something Amelia took as a sign that things were finally working out for her. And they were. Until they weren't okay anymore, but by the time she realized it was too late and she felt the eerie quiet left by the absence of pain. Only Amelia knew pain never left. Pain was there, it was Amelia that was gone this time.

Amelia was the shell of the brilliant surgeon she'd become. Amelia knew why she'd done this, rationally it wasn't all that hard to even guess. Pain had become too much and she had tried to find a way out even when she knew there wasn't one. It started with a drink, she could drink, her problem was with drugs not alcohol, so why not. Because addiction works the same way no matter the object, as a neurosurgeon she might have conveniently overlooked that fact. Alcohol had numbed her pain for a while there, without adding to the guilt of breaking nearly ten years of sobriety. It was just a glass, just to feel better, just to feel normal for once. Alcohol burned down and altered her world differently then drugs and it wasn't quite enough, but she made it be enough. The kid that witnessed her father's murder and the barely alive teenager urged her to let this be enough, because if she gave in again, if she stopped fighting it would all have been for nothing. And Amelia tried, really, really hard. She fought until she could not fight anymore.

Rock bottom was pain's cave, pain's nest, it was where it used to go all those times she found a way – any way – to chase it away. Now, though, it wasn't alone. As Amelia woke up in the cave, pain was lounging there, hand in hand with regret. It seemed the second she'd lost her love, pain found his. It was such a suffocating feeling and unlike when pain engulfed her in the back of that ambulance, she felt air thinning and slowly disappear around her. This time it wasn't just the drugs keeping pain relegated to his hiding place, it wasn't just the pills and it wasn't just the alcohol. Ryan kept the pain away. In a way, in some unexplainable way Ryan chased it away, a lot like Derek did. It wasn't just the drugs, Ryan made her want to live forever, despite pain. Up to that point no one had ever been able to get there, not even Derek not even the rest of her family, Amelia had lived on borrowed time all that while mostly because she had no idea there was another way to live than just exist.

It was anguish that woke her up that morning. Anguish was pain's shadow, it was almost invisible at times, but she could trust it was always there. Pain didn't come that morning, though, pain didn't come for a while. The second Amelia pressed her ear on Ryan's chest, her medical training already yelling at her that he was gone, when she pressed herself on him in the faint hope to will him back to life anguished hugged her so tight she couldn't breathe. It was a blur, for a little bit there, Amelia wasn't sure if pain was there because Amelia wasn't there herself. Going back to being a surgeon felt like rebuilding her life from scratch – in a way, it was exactly what she did. Pain had a lot of company those days. Amelia had to make up, or at least she felt like she had to, to everyone there, Sheldon, Addison and Charlotte in particular. She felt loved like she hadn't in such a long time and she hoped it would be enough for her to pull through. Ryan's love – whatever it had been – felt like an illusion most days and, in the few rare occasions Amelia allowed herself to think about it, it felt like she was being torn apart, ripped in half. It was a different, new kind of pain and she wondered, Amelia wondered, how many more she'd get to experience.

Losing Ryan, losing someone she thought she loved, her first love, now seemed like nothing. Not when the mere action of living hurt. Not when she didn't want to live herself. Because this kind of pain had nothing on anything she ever felt. The sum of all the losses put together didn't even begin to compare. Amelia felt like dying from the inside out, which was ironic, considering she was creating a new life right inside of her. A new life that would never really be a life outside of the safety of her body. Amelia found an equilibrium, a goal, a way to get through the upcoming few months of her life, focusing on keeping healthy for herself and her and Ryan's baby to be able to save many more babies worked. A little like a bruise, it's there and it hurts whenever you move, but if you're careful and avoid certain movements and if you make sure not to touch it, it doesn't even hurt that much. It didn't hurt all that much. Until she poked it, or rather, her baby did. Feeling him kick, finally realizing a human being was residing in her womb hurt more than she could quantify in something humanly definable.

In fact, the day he was born after about twenty-four agonizing hours, she didn't feel it anymore. For the first time since she could remember pain wasn't there, regret, disappointment, they were all gone. Amelia felt alone. Amelia had no idea how to go on now, all by herself. Only it was just an illusion. Watching her child being taken away by her doctors, her friends, her family, to be taken apart was something that required an unimaginable strength and would come with an unimaginable amount of fresh, gut wrenching, raw pain. It was so much, Amelia didn't even feel it, almost as if her sensory system couldn't perceive it in its entirety. Luck? Perhaps survival instinct, whatever it was Amelia was glad for that. She'd seen it in patients. They called it the surge and Amelia had remembered because her other brother went through that literally weeks after her baby died. She'd spent her childhood chasing after him and Derek, and when Derek assumed the role of father figure in her life, Mark became her brother. Her brother died.

When her brother died Amelia couldn't feel it. She was anesthetized to that kind of pain. She'd reached her point of tolerance and she could no longer be affected by it. Not when she'd lost her father and the love of her life and her son. In a rebirth of sorts Amelia figured there was an amount of pain a person could feel in a lifetime and she'd reached her capacity limit, so she would never feel anymore, even when bad things happened. Pain would never get to grow anymore. Pain and her were at peace, she'd accepted his existence long ago and now she was finally accepting his ever constant presence in her life. It felt normal, no new and no exciting, life after having her heart ripped out of her chest, life after giving birth to the baby of her dead fiancé, life after watching her baby die was normal. Amelia was ready for normal. Amelia had been ready for normal for a long time. James was normal.

It was relaxing and it felt like fresh air coming in her lungs. The best thing about normal was that normal felt safe. Pain was there, hanging out with all his friends, but her and pain were now okay with each other, it was okay for him to be there. that was until Amelia discovered the problem with normal. She was brilliant, driven, dynamic, curious and normal was boring. Safe was boring and Amelia could only take that much boring in her life. Just like she'd done plenty times in the past, Amelia ran. To be fair, Amelia didn't run from boring. Amelia ran from memories and hopefully a little of the pain that would inevitably be there in LA forever, she ran from a relationship that felt like a cage. Amelia loved James, but she didn't love him like he loved her. The kind of love Amelia needed was Ryan's love and Ryan was dead.

In a circle of life kind of twist, Amelia ended up living with Derek. At last she'd gone to the one person she truly wanted to be with. She'd spent all her life circling around him, wanting to be him, wanting to be the center of his universe just like he was hers. The Derek she found, though, wasn't the Derek she'd left years before. It had been easy to worm her way into his life, move in with him with a lame excuse, getting a job – _his_ job . Derek wasn't normal, but he was safe. He was the exception in her life. Derek was an in between of Ryan and James and Amelia needed him. What she'd forgotten during this heat of the moment life change, was pain. Pain didn't like the move, pain was blind sided by the move. Amelia realized her mistake as soon as her life in Seattle started to take shape. No friends. No down time. She lived in a freaking guest room with Meredith and two small children. Derek was either in DC or fighting with Meredith, the few times she actually got to see him was when he was trying to steal her job – to get his job back. Amelia had walked right into a nightmare.

As the silence outside grew quieter, pain became louder and louder and Amelia found something she thought she'd somehow managed to leave behind. Anguish. It was there, when she worked, when she drove home, when she'd spend days not uttering a single word to anyone. Just like that she was back to Amelia the brilliant surgeon, Amelia who had to claw her way on in the professional world and she'd never had to do it as much as she did right here. Taking out a tumor deemed impossible by not one nor two, but six other world class neurosurgeons with only minimal damage was a huge pat on the back and a shove to pain, far away from reach. It had been sudden and maybe Amelia hadn't been paying enough attention, but the shove had not come from her. Owen Hunt had come out of left field and thrown her companion away.

The way Owen was able to keep pain at bay, at a manageable distance felt like drugs. The good ones, not the ones from the pier dealer. The expensive ones. Owen was the drug she'd probably been looking for all along. After nearly thirty years with pain by her side, though, Amelia missed him when Owen didn't allow him any closer. Amelia felt a little disoriented and alone, even with this man by her side. Owen offered her a life she never knew existed, a life she was desperately hitching to have, a life not even Ryan could have given her. Amelia found suddenly at a crossroads, Owen on one side and her current life on the other. Those were the constants, the unknown variable was pain. Would he follow? Would he still be with her if she decided to go with Owen, because Amelia wished like hell there was a way to leave him behind and maybe this was it. On the other hand, just as she could get rid of him completely, he could double up – god knows he'd done it enough already. The searing pain that she'd lived with after holding her child was not something Amelia believed she could survive if she were to go through that again. In that moment, she realized her life was now safe with the slightest hint of exciting, not nearly what she'd have liked, but the risk wasn't worth the stakes – or so she thought.

That must be what people call the calm before the storm. In hindsight it would be more appropriately called the quite before the apocalypse, if there was one thing she wasn't ready for was this. What Amelia had gone through in life was just a cluster of unlucky and highly improbable all squished together to fit in, all taking form in pain. Not even pain was ready for this. In choosing to let Owen go, Amelia was left with pain only by her side, feeling his overbearing presence more than ever. She wasn't ready for it and he wasn't either. When it happened it didn't make any sense, because how can the universe still exists if there's nothing in the center, how can it work, how does it not collapse on itself? It didn't. Amelia waited for it and waited for it and she sat calmly as the pieces started to crumble down – Meredith disappeared, taking away Bailey and Zola, and Owen left her. Owen left, but Amelia needed Owen to stay. She couldn't be with him, but she found she couldn't be without him either. Amelia sat by and watched her universe bend on itself, falling apart around her.

Not even pain was there anymore, the irony was now she really was alone. Amelia found the situation hilarious, her morbid humour finding fertile minds to plasm and naïve interns to laugh at her jokes. Amelia effectively shut down. She slept, she ate and she operated. It was only afterwards that she realized Christmas had passed, watching a santa suit thrown in the trash outside the hospital. Everyday she'd watch her phone, noting how the missed calls kept growing, the emails, texts, she delighted in watching the little red dot dilate with every incoming number. Amelia was a ghost, she was a shadow of the person she'd once been. Maybe that's all it was after all. There was nothing left, she had nothing left to lose. She'd made it there. Maybe that was why pain was gone. She'd reached the absolute amount of pain. It felt good. It felt good to know there would be no more pain. It felt so good. This life felt good, because it didn't feel like anything at all. No good, no pain, no nothing. Amelia didn't feel anything anymore and it never felt so good.

She knew it as soon as she saw him standing there. Amelia figured it out. She solved the mystery. Owen was special, Owen was nearly magical. Owen took her pain away. Literally. Because every time she saw him there was a little bit less. Everything he touched her, held her, kissed her she felt lighter. Problem was, Amelia had filled her pain bearing capacity up to the brim in a short few seconds almost a year ago and she hadn't felt all of this pain in it's magnitude before she became completely inhibited by it. She'd felt like she'd been hit by a supernatural force, like she'd been pushed in a completely different dimension. The slightest bit of pain taken away would cause her to get back into the real world, a world filled nearly with pain. It hit her straight to her chest and before she knew it she was staring at it. Inside the plastic baggie there was enough oxy that she could not wake up in the morning, she could not wake up at all. Ever again.

Amelia hated Owen then. The kind of hate that overruled love. The kind of hate she felt deep in her bones. Owen convinced her not to do it. Owen convinced her to wake up in the morning. Amelia didn't want to wake up. In the morning she would wake up in a world with no kids, with no Meredith – she'd wake up in a world where Derek was dead. Amelia couldn't even fathom the idea that a world could exist without Derek to begin with. Finally, her universe collapsed.

Her world imploded, it fell apart to a million pieces and Owen was there to hold it all together. Amelia figured out Owen could take in her pain and slowly there would be only little left. Enough that she could go by with her lifelong companion, leading a relatively normal life. Not anybody could, but Owen did. Owen took her pain away and she could never forget that. Owen saved her life that night and he made sure she could live for a long time yet. Amelia wasn't sure what love felt like, but it must be something like this. In the morning, when she woke, she was in the trailer swallowed in clothes that were several sizes too big, sprawled on the tiny bed, but not alone. Owen was right there, pretending he hadn't been staring at her for a while, he just smiled and stood to make breakfast, not wanting to talk or press for answers or for her to do anything other than _live_. He'd just waited to make sure he'd actually convinced her to live and not just exist.

Life went on. Her universe reshaped and she had to become the center of her own universe until somebody else was ready to take that place. Amelia let Meredith be her family, because deep down she really was. It was hard to live together. Something neither was willing to realize was how much they underestimated each other's pain having been through the exact same thing, Meredith had lost Lexie and Amelia had lost Ryan. It was the same and the complete opposite all at the same time. Ryan was Amelia's real first love, he was the father of her baby and she'd got about a month with him, he was never her post it husband and he never built her a house in the woods. Meredith had known Lexie for just a few years, something that didn't even begin to compare to the bond between Derek and Amelia. Not even Meredith saw it. Pain made them selfish, pain made them blind to the outside world, it made them blind to the world of the people around. Pain made them blind to other people's pain.

The one thing that Amelia learnt, though, was that she wasn't special or an exception. Pain wasn't hers only. After so many years Amelia finally realized everyone had pain. Pain is an existential part of everyone's life, like hunger or thirst. Amelia knew Owen had pain and Meredith had pain and every single other person around her had pain. More than that, living - being alive - it was about taking someone else's pain away, her and Meredith couldn't because her own pain and Meredith's had a lot in common, but on the other hand Owen could easily absorb her and – she liked to think – she could take in his. It wasn't ideal and it was far from perfect, but at the end of the day, perfect didn't really cut it, not for Amelia. Amelia who's been through so much is content enough with that, a minimal amount of pain, just to know that he's still there with her, happily taking away someone else's.


End file.
